History of the KDP
By Rene Ciria Cruz (from “A Time to Rise”)
It may not be readily apparent in the very personal stories in the collection “A TIme To Rise” that a dispassionate revolutionary consciousness made the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP, or Union of Democratic Filipinos) aunique political phenomenon in the Filipino American community in the 1970s and 1980s. The secret to the organization’s viability was its constant, detached analysis of the conditions that defined its community, in order to change them through progressive political activity.
Although adherence to Marxism was not a requirement for KDP membership, Marxist theory shaped the group’s collective consciousness. It was the lifeblood that sustained the organization for nearly two decades, through time both inspiring and dispiriting. With this consciousness, the young KDP activists were able to move in concert in the United States, wage and actually win political battles for reform, and establish an undeniable leftist presence in what was a conservative post-World War I Filipino American community.
However, the KDP also flourished in no small measure because the world’s political temper was so different at the time. For many members of the baby boom generation, it was a time to rise. Capitalism, even in the United States, looked vulnerable, besieged by surging armed movements for national liberation worldwide and shaken by unrest at home. Political theorists both revolutionary and establishmentarian considered the wave of national liberation struggles to be the motivating forces for the global expansion of socialism as capitalism’s rival.
The existence of the Soviet bloc, China, and Cuba-combined with the revolutionary ferment in Latin America and Asia and the anti-colonial guerrilla wars in Africa, made it seem possible that capitalism could collapse within the postwar generation’s lifetime. Imminent revolution to young minds was conceivable even in the UnitedStates. This international zeitgeist inspired radical left movements worldwide.
Though fully aware of their ambitious aims, KDP founders could not foretell the marked impact their work would have on their community in more than a decade of activism. The new group became instrumental in keeping alive a broad, US-based opposition to the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, while also mobilizing Filipinos based on steadfast advocacy for their rights as a minority group in the United States.
The KDP had fairly sophisticated operations: a centralized national lead-ership; chapters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Seattle,New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Sacramento, San Diego, and affiliated organizations in Canada (Toronto, Vancouver,and Montreal). Its newspaper, Ang Katipunan, projected the group’s politics even after the KDP’s dissolution in July 1986. The Newspaper continued operating until 1991 as Katipunan (whose masthead read, “A Socialist Newsmagazine”).
Favorable Conditions
Looking back at the early 1970s, when the KDP emerged in the Filipino American community, feels like memorial archeology. To say that a revolutionary organization of Filipino Americans existed seems an exaggeration, especially considering today’s tame political environment. The world was so different then. Capitalism, particularly in the United States, looked vulnerable, besieged by surging armed movements for national liberation worldwide.
These movements had found political openings during the Second World War and had gained postwar momentum. Revolutionary theorists establishmentarian ones alike considered them the motive forces for the global expansion of socialism as a competing system. The existence of the Soviet bloc, China and Cuba, combined with the revolutionary ferment in Latin America and Asia and the anti-colonial guerrilla wars in Africa all made it seem possible that capitalism could collapse within the postwar generation’s lifetime. Revolution was conceivable even in the United States as well as in other developed centers of capitalism. That was the international zeitgeist and political temperature that hatched an organization that cohered young and progressives in the small Filipino community in the United States.
Even the founding members of KDP were not fully aware of the impact they would have on the politics of their community over the next decades. It would oppose racism and the system that begets this form of oppression. The new group’s mission was to mobilize broad opposition to the U.S.-backed Marcos dictatorship and organize Filipinos around a militant advocacy of their rights as a minority group in the United States. It would have chapters in cities with large Filipino concentrations, a centralized national leadership and a newspaper to amplify its political perspectives. Chapters were successfully built in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Sacramento, and San Diego, with affiliated organizations in Canada (Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal); a newspaper, Katipunan, would flourish until 1989.
The formation of a self-described revolutionary organization was a provocative event, a sure prelude to controversy in a relatively small community composed largely of recent immigrants and known for its political timidity. It meant an open challenge to the widespread influence of conservatism in community politics. The traditional community leaders, ensconced in often-redundant councils and associations, or in openly reactionary publications, now faced a highly organized challenge, in a community-wide split that would be both ideological and generational.
A number of factors ensured that the KDP’s impact would be immediate. The postwar generations everywhere were confronting the established order and overthrowing ruling political and cultural truisms. The United States itself was in the midst of an internal upheaval against long standing racism, the American war in Vietnam, and imperial intervention elsewhere. An all-sided culture war raged, with American youth overturning conservative values and lifestyles. The Philippines too was convulsing, wracked with economic and political crisis for the first time in its life as a young republic.
The “external” conditions, therefore, were favorable for the development of a radically progressive trend in the Filipino American community. The “internal” basis was also favorable. The overwhelming majority of Filipinos were wage earners. Even recent immigrants, who came with American-influenced skills and facility with English, had little problem melding into the labor force. With wage earning as their main source of livelihood (the entrepreneurial sector would remain small compared with its pronounced presence in other immigrant communities), Filipinos would share the conditions of wage earners in general. As immigrants they would face discrimination because of their national origins; they would also experience it as nonwhites. These realities tend to grind against treasured illusions about America.
Furthermore, radicalism was not a new phenomenon among Filipinos in America. It had emerged before among the pioneer immigrants in the 20 s and 30s, who were brought to Hawaii and the West Coast by a U.S. agribusiness hungry for cheap and unorganized labor. Exploitative working conditions and open racism led to periods of political ferment. In the face of anti-miscegenation laws, denial of citizenship and physical attacks by white racists, these First Wave immigrants set up mutual aid societies, Masonic organizations, anti-discrimination committees and labor organizing groups.
Many of their leaders still held the nationalist views that had fed the revolution against Spain and the resistance to American occupation of the Philippines early in the 20th century. A number joined or were influenced by the Communist Party of the USA; men like the writer Carlos Bulosan or labor leaders like Ernesto Mangaoang, Chris Mensalves, Mario Hermoso, Pablo Valdez and Jorge Frianeza (who later became a central committee member of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas; he was killed in the Southern Tagalog mountains by Philippine soldiers). Thus, radical views of anti-clericalism and pro-Philippine independence and socialism had a visible presence among the organized sections of the First Wave.
The first progressive current among Filipinos, however, had serious limitations. The pioneer immigrants were mostly itinerant bachelor farm workers who followed the farming seasons. Their lack of opportunity to establish families meant that stable communities could not take root while racism blocked their integration into US society. Even the US communist movement failed to pay particular attention to their status as nonwhite and foreign-born workers. Relatively isolated, without stable, multigenerational communities, the progressives could not ensure the continuity of their influence. While historically an important source of political lessons for future activists, the First Wave experience would be overshadowed by the conservative impact of the coming of the Second Wave of immigrants.
The Second Wave qualitatively altered the community’s social and political profile. Younger First Wave immigrants who had served in the US military during World War II were granted American citizenship. They came back from the Philippines with war brides and were later joined by retiring US Navy enlistees and other service veterans. With citizenship, new families, government jobs and military benefits that buffered them somewhat from economic pressures, they quickly formed stable communities on the West Coast. This emergence coincided with the defeat of the American left by McCarthyism, which dissipated the traces of First Wave progressivism.
Soon, the Second Wave’s regional and religious groups, councils and veterans’ posts the community’s social life. So did a particular strain of conservatism bred by the anti-communist backlash and the joint US-Philippines experience in the war. Filipino hatred of the Japanese occupation of the archipelago and gratitude for the return of American forces served to consolidate a nationalism that incorporated loyalty to the American “liberators.” Colonial mentality buttressed by this type of nationalism held sway in the post-war Filipino community in the United States. Assimilation was pursued with illusions and ideological blinders. Being “good Americans” as quickly as possible was the instinctive response to racism in the military, the neighborhoods and the civilian workplace: children must learn English without any trace of accents; Filipinos must prove themselves more deserving of trust than other nonwhites; they must steer clear of trouble and suffer slights in silence.
Conservatism among Filipinos, however, had significant vulnerabilities. The community was by no means well off, with Filipinos largely holding down modest-paying jobs and not immune to economic pressures. In addition, the Second Wave produced a baby-boom generation whose illusions were more fragile than their parents’: they were growing up as non-whites in America at a time when militant cultural challenges to white supremacy were emerging. The community was not hermetically sealed from the political upheavals in the larger society. Thus, when the political and cultural explosions began rocking US society in the 60s and 70s, a significant segment of the Filipino community, mostly from the baby-boom generation, readily became critical of the prevailing conservatism.
The civil rights movement and the protests against the war in Vietnam generated a radicalization of American youth, with words like “imperialism,” “revolution,” and “socialism” becoming part of the young’s political vocabulary. The upheavals had a dramatic impact on society. Soon, many second generation Filipino Americans were joining protests, marches, sit-ins and strikes against racism and the war and for ethnic studies in colleges. Many began questioning their community’s implicit acquiescence to second class citizenship. This inquiry inevitably led to a search “for one’s roots,” an identity movement that retrieved the narrative of the First Wave and its struggles and reexamined the Philippines’ colonial relationship with the United States.
Two developments facilitated the latter endeavor. For five years beginning in 1965, the United States eased its immigration policy to respond to domestic needs for certain skills and to propagate a Cold War image of the United States as a welcoming nation. Thus began the entry of “anchor” Third Wave immigrants, starting a chain of immigration that continues to this day. Included in this largest wave of immigration were college graduates deeply frustrated with the deterioration of Philippine society, at a time when Filipino nationalism and anti-imperialism were ascendant.
The eventual political explosions in the Philippines would resonate among Third Wave immigrants, and study groups emerged on the East Coast and in the Midwest, often leading to protest demonstrations in front of Philippine consulates and to academic conferences. Some immigrants formed the National Association of Filipinos in the U.S., while others formed the Support Committee for a Democratic Philippines in New York and Philadelphia and the Philippine Study Group in Chicago to study “the meaning of National Democracy.”
Second-generation Filipino American activists—especially on the West Coast– also followed Philippine events with enthusiasm, particularly the emergence of the New People’s Army and a new Communist Party as well as the explosion of massive protests against American influence on the country’s economy, politics and culture. Ferment spread among young Filipinos in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Honolulu and Seattle. Eventually, the Filipino Americans and their newly arrived counterparts found one another.
The Left Organizes
In 1971 a dozen Identity Movement radicals and immigrant activists from the Philippines formed a collective in San Francisco and published the newspaper Kalayaan. The newspaper articulated the views of the Identity Movement through anti-racist and anti-imperialist lenses and called for community support for the revolutionary armed struggle in the Philippines. Many Filipinos in the United States were first introduced to the CPP, the NPA and the National Democratic cause through Kalayaan.
Ferdinand Marcos’ suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the arrest of a number of prominent student leaders drove home the need for greater coordination among supporters of the Philippine Left. Thus, in 1972, Kalayaan hosted a conference in San Francisco to set up a nationwide anti-imperialist network. Just as the conference was taking place, Marcos declared martial law and seized dictatorial powers. Electrified, the conference called for nationwide protests and launched the National Committee for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in the Philippines.
Marcos’ coup d’etat polarized the Filipino community and fused the concerns of both Third Wave and Filipino American progressives into a single movement. On one side were the progressives and radicals, on the other were conservatives of both the Second and Third Waves who supported Marcos. There was also within the Identity Movement, with handfuls of Filipino American “community organizers” who claimed that opposition to the dictatorship was irrelevant to the concerns of the community and a distraction from real community issues.
Within the opposition to Marcos, an anti-communist wing was also evident—it would emerge a few years later, represented by the Movement for a Free Philippines–led by former Philippine government officials and elite personages. The Kalayaan radicals and their allies across the nation expected a long-term challenge as more disenfranchised politicians were expected to arrive as exiles. These elite personages would bolster the anti-Marcos’ movement’s conservative flank and use their prominence to influence the Filipino community and the larger public. While they were legitimate opponents of the dictatorship, they also tended to intrigue against the Left and obscure the relationship between U.S. military and economic interests in the Philippines. How were the emerging leftists going to navigate these complex demarcations within the community and fight for political influence among Filipinos here? The answer led directly to the founding of the KDP.
Kalayaan activists began laying the groundwork for a national “revolutionary organization” that would bring together, train and guide the most progressive and militant elements of the Filipino community. Its task would be to promote and defend the politics and program of the national democratic movement in the Philippines as well as the democratic and anti-imperialist agenda of the broad U.S. socialist movement. Finally, about 70 representatives from various study groups around the country convened in Santa Cruz, California on July 13, 1973 and founded the KDP on the basis of a “dual program” that adhered to national democracy and socialism. The KDP Congress called for centralized leadership on the national—a national council that met every six months, with a national executive board for day-to-day leadership–and local levels—chapter executive boards–a national newspaper, and a national congress of members every two years.
Consolidation
After its formation, the task of uniting and training a ragtag group of nearly 200 activists fell to a nine-member National Council whose National Executive Board would provide day-to-day leadership to the national operations. This task included guiding nine chapters, with the help of a national secretariat, and publishing Kalayaan’s successor, Ang Katipunan (later, simply Katipunan). At this juncture, key individuals played a crucial role in steering the organization through its growing pains and shaping its ability to establish an undeniable political presence in the community—Bruce Occena, Melinda Paras (both U.S.-born Filipinos) and Philippine-born Cynthia Maglaya composed the National Executive Board in the KDP’s early years.
Occena was a veteran of the ethnic studies student strikes in UC Berkeley; Paras, who joined the Kabataang Makabayan in the Philippines, was deported back to the United States shortly after Marcos imposed his dictatorship; Maglaya was a KM activist who was instructed to build a support movement here (she later passed away from a debilitating illness). This first National Executive Board spent a tremendous amount of intellectual energy consolidating the organization, drawing lessons from other revolutionary movements, and training activists in the rudiments of methodical organizing and political work.
The most immediate task of the national leadership, particularly the national executive board, was to consolidate the new organization on the basis of a revolutionary Marxist orientation, begin theoretical training of activists and unfold political and organizing work in the Filipino community. While the influence of Maoism unleashed activists’ enthusiasm and dedication, what would sustain the organization through the years were ideological work and theoretical education. National campaigns on both the Philippine and U.S. issues were launched both to break new political ground in the Filipino community and provide systematic training to activists on the science and mechanics of coordinated campaigns.
Lessons from these campaigns were then summarized by the national council, propagated through an internal bulletin called Ang Aktibista (The Activist) and generalized and deepened through yearly national leadership conferences. National congresses were combined with a national theoretical school that educated activists on basic Marxist principles. The express purpose of the organization’s theoretical education was “to learn not what Marx said, but how he thought.” Activists highly valued this ideological and theoretical training; it gave them confidence, heightened their capacity for leadership in the community, and reinforced their commitment to the cause.
The results of their efforts showed very quickly. Throughout the 1970s, the Filipino community was drawn into a sustained flow of political activity. Publications like the now-defunct Ningas Cogon called the 70s “a decade of awakening and action,” and even the anti-communist Philippine News begrudgingly recognized the role of the KDP in the unexpected eruption of Filipino grassroots activism.
Consistent Opposition to Dictatorship
Politically, the first order of business was laying the groundwork for a consistent and cumulative exposure of the Marcos dictatorship’s crimes and the self-serving support it received from the United States government. This meant organizing a well-oiled network of grassroots opposition that included non-KDP anti-Marcos individuals and organizations. The Anti-Martial Law Coalition (later to become the Coalition Against the Marcos Dictatorship after the nominal lifting of martial law), was therefore founded in a national conference in Chicago in 1974. The newly established Movement for a Free Philippines led by former Senator Raul Manglapus was invited but refused to participate.
The AMLC went ahead, and for the rest of the decade launched nationally coordinated campaigns, educating the community and non-Filipinos on the plight of political prisoners, the U.S. motivations in propping up Marcos, the regime’s various maneuvers for legitimacy, and its multifarious crimes, from corruption to human rights violations. These campaigns took the form of petition drives, timed and emergency demonstrations, Christmas caroling, speaking tours of secret delegations to the Philippines and deported or exiled critics of the regime, and fundraisers for internal refugees and the Philippine labor movement.
During the 1978 rigged Philippine elections, AMLC activists occupied Philippine consulates in five cities in protest. The coalition produced and disseminated books, pamphlets, photo exhibits, slideshows, posters, and a monthly broadsheet called Taliba, which regularly featured exposes of the Marcos regime’s abuses. The KDP also helped in organizing the Friends of the Filipino People, and with the AMLC set up the Congress Education Task Force in Washington, DC. This agency gave Marcos a scare by successfully pushing for some aid cuts to the regime during the Carter administration. As a result of years of consistent work, the AMLC was the only organization capable of coordinating a quick nationwide campaign of protests during Marcos’ visit to the United States in 1982.
Amid a reinvigorated anti-Marcos grassroots movement, the KDP independently popularized the program of the National Democratic Front in the Philippines as well as the leading role played by the Communist Party of the Philippines. It also independently organized medical and financial aid drives for the underground opposition. The KDP as a matter of policy responded to every major intrigue against the national democratic left in the Philippines and was fomented by the regime’s operatives and exiled elite oppositionists.
Anti-Discrimination Campaigns
Pursuing its dual line program, KDP activists also initiated political mobilization around domestic U.S. issues, politically activating Filipinos who might have been hesitant to join the anti-dictatorship movement.
In 1975 the KDP led a successful campaign to stop the deportation of Filipino doctors trapped by the technical and bureaucratic maneuvers of the American medical establishment and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. This was immediately followed by a similar campaign that prevented the deportation of hundreds of nurses victimized by licensure tests that were slanted against graduates from underdeveloped countries. Activists organized a community-nurses coalition known as the National Alliance for Fair Licensure for Foreign Nurse Graduates.
Meanwhile, attempts to frame and make scapegoats out of two Filipino nurses, Leonora Perez and Filipina Narciso, for mysterious deaths in a veterans hospital in Michigan sparked outrage among Filipinos everywhere. The KDP stepped in, sending activists to Chicago and Ann Arbor to systematically build defense committees nationwide that raised funds, organized the first nationwide protest of Filipinos against racial and national discrimination and circulated petitions for the defendants who were later acquitted. A similar campaign in 1979 defended US Navy physician Dr. Bienvenido Alona from being framed as a scapegoat for the malpractice of white doctors. In 1977 activists stirred up a hornet’s nest over the exploitative treatment of Filipino 4-H trainees in U.S. farms, putting pressure on both the Philippine government and the 4-H Foundation to institute program reforms.
These national campaigns gave activists new skills in organizing, mobilization and mass communication as well as gave the organization a recognizable profile as a militant advocacy group. Regional or local campaigns soon flourished as Filipinos brought cases of job discrimination or police misconduct to the attention of the KDP. In 1976 activists led an education task force that challenged the racist depiction of Filipinos in California’s school textbooks. They also campaigned for low-cost housing in Seattle’s International District, even while they initiated efforts to reform the Alaska Cannery Workers Union Local 37, which was under the control of corrupt leaders and their goons. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, they mobilized a broad, citywide coalition to stop the eviction of the elderly tenants from the demolition-bound International Hotel, demanding low-cost housing for the displaced. The city had to send riot police to yank demonstrators from the hotel and evict the tenants they were defending.
On the West Coast, KDP activists moved into the center of the annual Filipino Far West Convention, bringing to the agenda of community organizers and leaders such topics as busing, bilingual education, immigrant rights, the Philippine political situation and even such broader issues as nuclear disarmament and U.S. military intervention in Central America. Deliberately challenging the conservatives’ consulate-centered exclusive gala festivities on June 12 Philippine Independence Day, KDP chapters built local coalitions to mark the date as Philippine National Day—“a day to commemorate the Filipino people’s continuing desire for independence” and the Filipino minority’s struggle for equal rights in the United States and Canada–with community-wide celebrations that dwarfed the conservatives’ galas.
Using cultural activities for political education, activists organized a specialized drama group called Sining Bayan, which toured nationally, staging original productions that portrayed the Moro people’s fight for self- determination in the Philippines, the experiences of pioneer Filipino immigrants and that of the postwar Second Wave. The group toured Hawaii with a dramatization of the contributions of Filipino workers to the labor movement in the islands. But even before Sining Bayan was organized, the KDP in 1974 produced a long-playing record of revolutionary songs from the anti-dictatorship underground movement, which circulated widely here and in the Philippines.
There were certainly growing pains; but activists’ early “ultraleft” mistakes in rhetoric and action, which alienated a few potential allies, steadily gave way to political maturity. In 1976 misunderstandings about the KDP’s “dual program” led activists in the Chicago chapter to split away “to focus on Philippine support work.” The organization sent a small team of activists to the city to both implement the full program and to start a dialogue with the breakaway group. The leadership of the Philippine underground intervened by discouraging the split, stating that “there’s more that unites us than divides us. The split was healed after a year of the reconciliation process.
Reactions from the Right
As for conservatives in the community, the initial response to the rising tempo of community activism was the reactionary warnings, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” and “Don’t rock boat.” Seeing that these had no appeal among even recent Filipino immigrants–especially as the broader social scene encouraged protest and political advocacy—conservatives switched to paying lip service to “relevant issues.” Aware of the growing links between anti-Marcos activism and the anti-discrimination ferment, the consulates and their allies in community councils and pro-Marcos publications began issuing their own anti-discrimination rhetoric while trying to isolate “red infiltrators” and “radical troublemakers.”
Some of the organization’s detractors were self-declared “progressives,” even “leftists,” who refused to give it credit for any accomplishment and were often the sources of political intrigues. Some of them attacked the KDP’s role in the FFP in 1979, precipitating an open split in the latter. The incident gave elements that had axes to grind the opportunity to initiate the first major anti-communist attack on the organization. The Philippine News, the unofficial publication of the Movement for a Free Philippines, spearheaded this attack; its publisher openly declared that he opposed communists more than he opposed Marcos.
Meanwhile the Marcos government stepped up covert actions in the Filipino community, using its own agents as well as allies in conservative circles. A plan, later uncovered, called “Philippine Infiltration Plan” and in operation since 1973, involved not only spying on activists, but also phoned threats, attempts to disrupt public events, and even an arson attempt on the KDP office in Chicago. These intimidation efforts culminated in the assassination of KDP activists and Local 37 union officials Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, on June 1, 1981 in Seattle. The two had just successfully linked up with the resurgent labor movement in the Philippines and were mobilizing support from trade unions here when they were gunned down in cold blood by hoodlums linked to an operative of Ferdinand Marcos. (Later, the families of the two victims won damages in a wrongful death suit against the Marcos estate.)
Through Freedom of Information Act files, the organization was also able to confirm that U.S. government agencies such as the FBI and U.S. Naval Intelligence conducted secret surveillance of KDP activists, even coordinating information gathering with Manila. The Reagan administration and the Marcos regime also attempted to push through an extradition treaty, with Marcos naming key opposition leaders, both among moderates and the KDP as his prime targets.
Decline and Dissolution
Ultimately, failure to surmount several pressures led to the disbandment of the organization in 1989. These pressures included the passage of activists into mature adulthood and its associated needs and responsibilities; the decline of the U.S. progressive movement; a troubled relationship with the Philippine revolutionary movement, and the collapse of existing socialism and the undermining of Marxist theory.
In hindsight, the KDP leadership didn’t provide for the continuity of the organization as formerly youthful activists in their twenties and thirties began the transition to middle age, as the desire to start families or resume postponed education and careers began to pull irresistibly. Concretely, the organization did not make plans for transforming the work and responsibilities of older activists as well as for attracting and recruiting the next generation of activists. While long-term planning may not have guaranteed continued existence, it would have provided the organization at least better odds of surmounting increasingly difficult political conditions.
Indeed, the U.S. political scene was cooling rapidly. The U.S. progressive movement, which began receding with the end of the Vietnam War, ebbed deeper as the 80’s ushered in the Reagan “counterrevolution.” In the midst of this ebb, dislocations and discontinuities in the leadership of the Philippine revolutionary movement resulting from arrests and deaths seriously weakened the mutual understandings and previous “working arrangements” with the KDP leadership. In the interest of preserving forces and facilitating their training, all left activists were to be concentrated in one organization—the KDP. However, it was understood that this was an expedient and temporary setup, that eventually, activists oriented towards the U.S. left movement would leave the organization to take up responsibilities there.
By the 1980s the Philippine leadership was objecting to the departure of such activists at the expense of Philippine support work. Overlapping this tension were differences over the “international line,” with KDP leadership advocating for a reexamination of the Philippine movement’s Maoist orientation. China’s invasion of Vietnam and the Philippine left’s official support for China’s action sharpened this “line disagreement.”
To the U.S. activists, the Maoist identity alienated the movement from the “mainstream” of international socialism and unnecessarily cost the Philippine movement vital support from the then-existing socialist bloc, which refused to break with the Soviet Union on the basis of the Maoist criticism of “revisionism” and “social imperialism.” The Philippine leadership finally sent its own organizers to build its own operations and mass organizations that are exclusively oriented towards “Philippine support work.” It demanded the dismantling of the KDP and refused to legitimize the latter’s Philippine support work by shunning any joint activities. As political ferment over the assassination of Benigno Aquino flowed towards the eventual overthrow of the Marcos regime, the new Philippine support groups briefly flourished. However, they too soon declined after the People Power uprising put Cory Aquino in power.
The Philippine left’s decision to boycott the election leading to Marcos’ ouster and its refusal to support Aquino during the campaign stopped the left’s momentum and its broad influence quickly receded. Meanwhile, the KDP’s independent position of not joining the left boycott and supporting Aquino’s bid cemented its ties with moderate oppositionists here but further deepened its alienation from the Philippine left.
The collapse of the European socialist bloc proved fatal to most remnants of the U.S. left, including the KDP. With the validity of its strategic paradigm seriously in doubt, both practically and theoretically, the organization finally disbanded in 1989, although its newspaper, Katipunan, continued publishing until 1991. Many KDP activists, however, would continue to serve as progressive leaders in the Filipino community, leading advocacy groups and gaining influential responsibilities in civil society and even in government. These Filipino American progressives continue to value and rely on the political and organizational skills and insights they acquired during the intense years of activism they spent with the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino.